From Happy Meat to Eco-Types: The Cultural Politics of the Climate Crisis

Meatscapes? Meat Paradoxes? Happy Meat? Eco-Types? In this episode, we interrogate the fraught ethical and cultural landscape of the climate crisis with three guests: prof. Josée Johnston (UToronto), prof. Shyon Baumann (UToronto) and prof. Emily Huddart (U British Columbia). We learn how and why people make and eat happy if not ecologically and ethically questionable meat, how people care for the environment in many ways and why this is often so politically divisive. We also learn why some sociologists take courses in animal butchery to answer such questions. Hosted by Luuc Brans, we do so by discussing two recent books: (1) the just-published Happy Meat by Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart and Merin Oleschuk (Stanford UP, 2025) and (2) Emily Huddart’s Eco-Types (Princeton UP, 2022). Happy Meat shows how consumers and producers make a story of ‘happy meat’ to overcome the ‘meat paradox’ while Eco-Types demonstrates how we all care in different ways for the environment and how this is linked to polarization. Finally, Emily Huddart and Josée Johnston also reveal some insights on their latest project on climate polarisation. Our guests show how a cultural sociological approach centring meaning making in the climate crisis can tell us important things about inequality, the climate crisis, and consumption, overlooked by other approaches. Readings: • Huddart, E. (2022). Eco-types: Five ways of caring about the environment. Princeton UP https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691239583/eco-types • Johnston, J., Baumann, S., Huddart, E., & Oleschuk, M. (2025). Happy Meat: The sadness and joy of a paradoxical idea. Stanford UP https://www.sup.org/books/sociology/happy-meat Emily Huddart (PhD, University of Alberta) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the motivations behind civic engagement aiming to protect the environment, and how pro-environmental practices reflect and reproduce social differences. She engages these problems in a research program centred on examining how gender, class, and political ideology contour environmental beliefs and practices and social solidarity. Josée Johnston (PhD, University of Alberta) is a Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto who aims to advance knowledge in the sociological study of food and consumer culture and understand how cultural and political forces reproduce and legitimate the inequitable and unsustainable features of capitalist economies. Her research spans the sub-fields of culture, gender, and political sociology; the subject of food is a natural way to make connections across these various sub-fields. Shyon Baumann (PhD, Harvard University) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research centres on the sociology of culture, with a focus on people's cultural evaluations, preferences and choices. He also studies the broad social influences on the status and legitimacy of cultural productions. His work aims to understand how cultural consumption and production are linked to social inequality. Luuc Brans (PhD, KU Leuven) is an FWO postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven. His research focuses on the intersection between culture, politics, and climate crisis, particularly in fashion. He currently explores how sustainability advocacy in fashion is linked to climate polarization. Podcast editors: Luuc Brans, Sanne Pieters, Kobe De Keere & Geert Veuskens
This podcast is co-financed from the BINQ project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant No. 101052649. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.
This podcast is also kindly supported by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) at the University of Amsterdam.